Wireless communications networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and the like. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources.
A wireless communications network may include a number of network devices such as access points (APs) that can support communication for a number of wireless devices. A wireless device may communicate with a network device bidirectionally. For example, in a wireless local area network (WLAN), a station (STA) may communicate with an associated AP via downlink and uplink. The downlink (or forward link) refers to the communication link from the AP to the station, and the uplink (or reverse link) refers to the communication link from the station to the AP.
In WLANs, there may be cases in which knowing the positioning (e.g., distance, delay) between two devices, such as between an AP and an associated station, may be useful. Existing wireless positioning techniques, however, tend to impact the throughput of the AP-station link because of the large number of frames that are typically exchanged to make measurements. Moreover, these techniques introduce significant measurement latencies and may impact the overall system throughput when an AP serves multiple stations for positioning. Therefore, wireless positioning techniques that are simpler to implement, have low latency, and have reduced bandwidth impact are desirable.